Unemployment to end for 1.3 million

Ethelyn Holmes, a software engineer who lives in Mission Hills, is one of 18,720 San Diego County residents about to lose the weekly payments.

She’s been on unemployment for about 60 weeks, after completing a six-month contract job at Sony last year. Other than a part-time teaching position at I.T.T. Technical Institute, she’s had no luck in the job market. Holmes said her $450 weekly unemployment payment goes to food, dental insurance, and other living necessities. Holmes, in her 40s, said she’s tried zealously to find work. She’s joined the Project Management Institute of San Diego, volunteered, attended meetings, cold called and written letters. Now, she said she’d like to find a retraining program to help her become more marketable.

“My last day (at Sony) was Nov. 7, 2012, and I have not been sitting here watching soap operas,” she said. “I would go to work tomorrow, or today. I really am tired of this.”

Alan Gin, an economist at the University of San Diego, said the job market remains tight, as there are still three applications for every available position.

“It’s not like there’s a lot of unfilled jobs out there that these people can take,” he said. “There has been a bias developing against people that have been unemployed for a long time, so it could be difficult for them to get jobs.”

Gin said the program should continue at least until the national unemployment rate falls below 6 percent, something he doesn’t see the U.S. reaching until the first half of 2015.

But Phil Blair, CEO of Manpower San Diego, a staffing agency, said he believes it’s time to end the program, albeit not this abruptly. He said strengthening career centers would be a better investment in getting people back to work faster.

“You need to retool yourself and decide what you are now,” Blair said. “If your skills are stale, then you owe it to yourself to do something about it and not keep taking unemployment benefits.”

In November, there were 109,800 unemployed San Diegans, down from 133,200 a year earlier. In recent years, California has borrowed $8.2 billion from the federal government to prop up its own insolvent unemployment insurance fund. California employers must foot the bill as the state pays down the principal on the federal loans.

Gene Sperling, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said Friday that President Obama wants to continue the federal extension program, warning the abrupt cut off will deliver a blow to the U.S. economy.

But Obama has no quick fix. He hailed this month’s two-year budget agreement as a breakthrough of bipartisan cooperation while his administration works with Democratic allies in the House and Senate to revive the extension of jobless benefits for those unemployed more than six months.